As many of you know, I have spent a considerable amount of time interviewing Rob Singer about his unique and controversial strategy for playing video poker.
Two rules appear to dominate his strategy:
1. He has a strict win goal of $2,500 per casino visit and then he leaves the casino or simply stops playing and just enjoys the rest of his trip or vacation.
2. He starts playing at low denominations and then moves up to higher denominations as needed to make up for losses and to lock in a win.
Now, I wonder if this strategy will "work" in a challenge that requires that he plays for 30 hours? The requirement for 30 hours of play with 500 hands played per hour means Rob Singer cannot use his "hit and run" strategy -- he has to keep playing. To conserve his money, he will probably play at lower denominations once he scores a big win. But if his "big win" (a royal flush, for example) comes at the $1 denomination he might find that a $4,000 payoff on a royal will not survive additional hours of play.
And if the royal flush is hit at a higher level, it probably means that Rob lost a lot of hands at a lower denomination and was forced to move up to a higher denomination to cover his losses with a big win at the higher bet level.
So the question becomes-- can Rob Singer's "hit and run" strategy in which he tries to score a big win and forsakes "hands that grind" cut the mustard when he has to keep playing for 30 hours at 500 hands per hour?
Or will Rob have to readjust his strategy for this challenge? Will he, for example, start playing at a higher denomination than usual knowing that his bankroll will have to survive 30 hours of play?
Singer is asking that he and his challenger each put $300,000 into a "prize escrow account." It seems to me that if Singer is asking for his challenger to put up $300,000 in escrow that Singer is not intending to play the low denomination games as he normally would, and he certainly does not have a win goal of $2,500 in mind either.